September 13, 2013, Splinterfields Workshops, Brussels

Splinterfields is an initiative of several Brussels-based organisations (Constant, FoAM, nadine and OKNO) active in the fields of ecological, technological and media arts to foster collaborative, agile and flexible learning. The programme of workshops, study groups and field-tests is open to artists, designers, technologists and other generalists curious to explore tools and mindware for experiments in contemporary culture and daily life.The workshop is designed as a master class, bringing together practitioners and enthusiasts in the art, science and technology of biochemistry and fermentation to learn from one another and find connections between their respective fields of interest.

FoAM’s Splinterfields workshops explore emerging technological arts through the lens of preindustrial crafts and contemporary sciences. The idea is to learn with bio-hacking, the fundamentals of biochemistry and the craft of fermentation.The workshop will include theoretical discussions about biochemical concepts with hands-on experiments in a wet lab and kitchen.

Aquatopia is a major exhibition of contemporary and historic art and artefacts that explores how the ocean deep has been imagined across cultures and through time to the present day. The exhibition and the accompanying book reveal how human cultures have projected their sexual desires, their will to power, and their fear of difference and death onto the ocean’s invisible depths and the life-forms it sustains. The deep in Aquatopia is a dream-state, akin to the unconscious. At the same time, its mythologies allegorise far-reaching historical processes—globalisation, colonisation, slavery, expropriation, subjugation, patriarchy.

The exhibition is curated by Alex Farquharson, Director of Nottingham Contemporary, in dialogue with Martin Clark, Artistic Director, Tate St Ives. It travels to Tate St Ives in October, and is a partnership between landlocked Nottingham Contemporary and oceanic Tate St Ives. It features over 150 loans from a great many museums and private collections, in particular Tate, Victoria & Albert Museum and National Maritime Museum.

May 17-8 September 2013, Make active choices. Art and ecology : How? , Museum of Modern Art

Freiburg is particularly involved in ecological issues; as a “Green city” it takes part in current discussions about sustainable development. In this dynamic, artists can bring new ideas : by getting involved, infiltrating, polemicising, reinterpreting and offering alternatives.For the exhibition Make active choices. Art and ecology : How? national and international artists are taking part the reflexion. With the active involvement of the visitors, the interaction between man and the environment becomes a concrete experience.

Freiburg theatre is taking part in the project by holding a symposium and an experimental game called “Regiodrom”. In front of the museum itself, urban gardeners work together with interested visitors to create green spaces. Moreover, the documentary “Earth”, directed by Alastair Fothergill and Mark Linfield, reveals insights into the natural world – providing a starting point and incentive for sustainable activities.

October 2013 – May 2014, The Vienna Project, Austria

The project is to be situated on the streets of Vienna and along the Danube Canal. Forging a dynamic relationship between different disciplines: art, video, typography, web design, street theater, sound art, history, archival research, and Holocaust education, The Vienna Project is envisioned as a “living” memorial based on a participatory model of engagement.

Developed through dialogue as a citizen-led initiative, The Vienna Project is a “process-based” expression of remembrance. The Vienna Project marks the 75th anniversary year of the Anschluss in 1938, when racial persecution officially began in Austria; it will conclude on V-E Day (Victory in Europe Day). The memorial project unfolds over the course of six months as a dynamic series of performative events, dedicated to stimulating fresh conversations in novel formats regarding the Holocaust and National Socialism.

Arte SusteMobile is an art and design exhibition which focuses on sustainable traffic and mobility. Some of the themes exhibited are : art in public transport, innovative means of public transport, human powered vehicles, flying and driving with hydrogen and solar power, solar airships, bionic structured airplanes, one world transport, energy efficient and noise reductive technologies and much more… In total over 70 artists, designers and university teams from 20 nations are involved.

RE-ART t(W)oo – shows art and design in the context of recycling, waste and social development. 55 artists from 15 nations exhibiting their works made from all kind of waste and scrap plus other positions pointing onto social and ecological problems and challenges.

September 28th 2013

Poets around the USA, and across the planet, gathered in a celebration of poetry to promote serious social, environmental, and political change : ” The first change is for poets, writers, musicians, artists, anybody, to actually get together to create and perform, educate and demonstrate, simultaneously, with other communities around the world.”

The idea is to change how people see the global society : ” We have all become incredibly alienated in recent years. We hardly know our neighbors down the street let alone our creative allies who live and share our concerns in other countries. We need to feel this kind of global solidarity.”

It appears that transformation towards a more sustainable world is a major concern and could be a global guiding principle for this event. There is an increasing sense that need to move forward and stop moving backwards : “Together we can develop our ideas of the change/transformation”. Each community group will decide their own specific area of focus for change for their particular event. 100 Thousand Poets for Change will organize “participants” by local region, city, or state, and find individuals in each area who would like to organize their local event.

September 2-6, 2013, in Buenos Aires, Argentina

The city of Buenos Aires, co-president of the Committee on culture of UCLG, organises an international seminar to discuss and to update the conceptual bases of our work. The seminar considers the current contents of Agenda 21 for culture, and will analyse the challenges laid out by the global community: the UN Post-2015 Development Agenda, the Global Taskforce of Local and Regional Governments, the Sustainable Development Goals, the Declaration of Hangzhou (UNESCO) on culture and sustainable development, Habitat III in 2016. The seminar will develop the following subjects :

1. The pillars of sustainable development and Agenda 21 for culture

2. The basis of local, regional and international cultural development

Deadline = August 9th

This interdisciplinary conference aims to respond to a range of material that addresses rural sustainability and regeneration, with a focus on how and why decisions are made at individual, local, community and government level. Bringing together perspectives from geography, history, policy-making, regeneration practitioners and the arts, the conference will open up the gaps between individual and collective aspiration and reality.

Since the development of the urban, the rural has been a place of both harmony and negativism. It switches from radical, alternative (anti-industrialist) space where we can renegotiate a relationship with ‘nature’, to uncultured backwater, representing little more than material resource. Such perspectives are formed in relation to history and space and need to be considered when reaching an understanding of, as well as approaches to, rural regeneration, in order to ask : Who is regenerating, and for whom?

Submissions are invited from any discipline – sciences, humanities, regeneration practice, arts – which, within the overall theme of a temporal/spatial understanding of rural sustainability and regeneration.

The Rural Artist Residencies has kicked off! Dorset, Uk

Cape Farewell is creating a series of Rural Artist Residencies. Artists will be invited on to the Rural Residencies programme to engage diverse, wide-reaching audiences with the local narratives of Sydling St. Nicholas in Dorset. The idea is to involve the local community, encouraging neighbours and villagers to hold a voluntary stake in the farm’s future.

Artists will interrogate the inspirational resilience and social ties that form when local communities embrace heritage, sustainability, and innovation. So far, Cape Farewell has established relationships with three farmers around Sydling St. Nicholas : Manor Farm, Huish Farm, and Dollens Farm. They have strong community ties, commit to good stewardship of the natural environment, and employ varied practice methods, which they openly invite the public to explore. For the first residency, Chris Drury has been invited to develop a personal response to the working life sustained by the valley, as a natural, cultural and community habitat.

WEAD seeks proposals for the upcoming issue of the WEAD magazine from artists working with “dirty water” projects.

“Rainwater, stormwater, graywater and blackwater are being treated with increasing frequency as important resources. Designers and artists, together with engineers and agencies, are highlighting the presence of water reuse in our communities through creative expression, interpretation, and the visible additions of green infrastructure.”

The articles chosen will appear in the next WEAD Magazine Fall/Winter 2013, and authors will receive a complimentary one-year membership to WEAD and $100 honorarium.